Lamborghini has never built cheap cars. From its beginnings in 1963, Automobili Lamborghini sought to build a mature gentleman’s express, though it quickly shifted focus to the brash, brightly colored supercars we know and love today.
Not all Lamborghinis are created equal, and certain models from its rich past stand above the rest. Below are the five most expensive Lambos that have ever sold at public auction. Interestingly, and as a testament to Lamborghini’s recent ascendancy in the collector car market, all but one of the 20 most expensive Lambos at auction sold in the 2020s. The sole exception was sold in 2019.
1971 Miura P400 SV
Sold for €3,942,500 ($4,456,208) at RM Sotheby’s Milan 2025
The Miura, first presented as a rolling chassis at the 1965 Turin Auto Show and ready for production in 1966, was Lamborghini’s first smash hit. Created by a team of young men in their 20s, it brought racecar looks and an exotic transverse mid-engine layout to the road. Even outside of Lamborghini, the Miura came to embody the “supercar” as we know it.
The early cars were not without their quirks, however. The nose lifted at speed, for example, and the ergonomics were awkward. A limited-slip differential would have been a welcome addition as well, but the common low-friction oil supply between the engine and gearbox made this upgrade a non-starter.
The Miura got two major revisions over the course of its 1966-73 run, with the Miura P400 S arriving in 1969 and the SV in 1971. The S brought vented brake rotors, power windows, optional air conditioning, revised rear suspension, and better tires, while horsepower jumped from 350 to 370 hp. The SV further revised the rear suspension, lowered the nose, flared the fenders for wider 15-inch low-profile tires, ditched the surrounding black trim around the headlights, and bumped power further to 385 hp.
Later SVs also received a split sump to give the engine and gearbox separate oil supplies, and this is one of the later split-sump cars. A U.S. market example, this car left Sant-Agata Bolognese with air conditioning and Rosso Corsa paint over Bleu leather. It won “Best Lamborghini” at Concorso Italiano’s Miura 50th Anniversary celebration held during Monterey Car Week in 2016, and its $4.456M final price in Milan is almost exactly the Miura SV’s condition #1 (concours, or best in the world) price in the Hagerty Price Guide.
1971 Miura P400 SV
Sold for $4,460,000 at Broad Arrow Amelia 2025
Lamborghini built nearly 800 Miuras, which means its first mid-engine marvel outsold all previous Lamborghinis by a wide margin. But these are still rare cars, and just 150 of them left the factory in the SV trim that the company launched at the 1971 Geneva Salon.
This one sold new to a Lamborghini agent and racing driver in Germany, finished in Arancio Miura over Gobi (beige) leather with cloth inserts and Testa di Moro (brown) dashboard. By the 1980s, it was in the Rosso Bianco Museum near Frankfurt and stayed there until the museum closed in 2006. It received a restoration from 2014-16, at a cost of €271,324. A decade ago, even condition #1 Miura SVs were worth less than $2M, but prices exploded during the first half of the 2020s.
1972 Miura P400 SV
Sold for $4,900,000 at RM Sotheby’s Dare to Dream Collection 2024
When Lamborghini introduced the first Miura, it was still a boutique carmaker with just a few years in the business, and at first the Miura was supposed to be a promotional tool, not the car that established the brand’s identity. Its initial name of P400 referred to the engine placement (“P” for Posteriore, Lamborghini’s first mid-engine car) and its displacement of 400 deciliters, but Mr. Lamborghini, a Taurus, also wanted a proper name and went with Miura, after a renowned breeder of fighting bulls. Bullfighting-related names have been a Lambo tradition ever since.
The hierarchy of Miura values is straightforward, with the first P400 at the bottom, the improved P400 S in the middle, and the fully developed P400 SV at the top. This one left the factory in Rosso Corsa with gold rocker panels over tan leather. Sold new to an Italian living in Germany, it later went to the U.K. where the owner had it converted to right-hand drive in the 1980s. A Hong Kong collector bought it in the 1990s and it received a full restoration.
Then, singer Jay Kay of Jamiroquai bought it, and both he and the car featured in a 2004 episode of Top Gear. It sold again before getting another restoration in Italy in the 2010s, which returned it to left-hand drive but gave it blue leather instead of the original tan. It sold at the RM Sotheby’s “Dare to Dream” auction of cars, motorcycles, automobilia, and memorabilia like collectible sneakers owned by Canadian financier Miles Nadal. It’s currently the most expensive Miura ever sold publicly, and it brought 34% above its condition #1 value at the time.
2015 Veneno Roadster
Sold for $6,000,000 by SBX Cars in 2024
Veneno means “poison” in Spanish, but in Lamborghini terms, it refers to a bull that gored a matador to death in 1914 as well as the Aventador-based special model built to celebrate the company’s 50th birthday. Just 13 were built, in what the company dubbed a “few-off” production run of four coupes and nine roadsters, the latter of which Lamborghini unveiled in 2014 on board an Italian Navy aircraft carrier.
This one was reportedly the second of those nine, bought new by a member of the House of Saud. In 2020, RM Sotheby’s consigned it for a Paris auction, but it did not sell at a $4.34M high bid. Four years later, it appeared online via the SBX Cars platform. It didn’t meet reserve in the first round of bidding but was reported sold immediately after the auction.
2014 Veneno Roadster
Sold for CHF8,280,000 ($8,355,348) at Bonhams Bonmont 2019
When the Veneno debuted, it carried a price tag of about $4M. In addition to its ultra-exclusive production numbers, it justified that number with its part-fighter-jet, part-barely-street-legal racecar looks, including the LMP-style adjustable rear fin. There was also pushrod suspension, a sticky set of tires, and 740 hp from its 6.5-liter V-12 driving all four wheels that pushed the Veneno to a 221-mph top speed.
The seventh of the nine roadsters built, this car showed just 325 km (202 miles) when it sold at a Bonhams auction in Switzerland six years ago. It was the star of what Bonhams touted as the “Supercar Collection” of 25 high-end exotics and luxury cars that included seven Ferraris, a Bugatti Veyron, and a Koenigsegg. They had been owned by the vice president and son of the president of Equatorial Guinea in West-Central Africa, but Swiss authorities seized them as part of an investigation into money laundering. Despite that not-so-great ownership history, the off-white over beige Veneno is still the most expensive Lamborghini we’ve ever seen sell.
Report by Andrew Newton
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